The guilty habits you have that drive others mad

It’s after 10am and the mail hasn’t arrived yet! Nothing too world shattering about that I guess, after all some people don’t ever get their mail before 3pm and they seem to survive alright. I suppose the important difference here is that my mail is usually in the box by 8am and I still haven’t had my mail fix, whereas the person whose mail habitually arrives much later in the day hasn’t even started thinking about it yet.

We are all governed to a large extent, by habit aren’t we? Some of us have to drink a cup of tea before we get out of bed in the morning, (or in some unhappy cases, smoke a cigarette!), we like to watch television news every evening, always at 6pm and always with the same television company. We know, deep in our subconscious that the news is pretty well exactly the same, whichever company we watch, but we do like to stick to ‘our’ news.

There are also extreme cases of people having, or suffering from, habits, some of which can be downright dangerous; motorists who always change lanes at an almost exact same spot on their way home from work, a hundred metres from where they intend to turn left onto another road. They’ll practically barge other motorists out of the way to move over, just there!

In another instance I heard about recently, this bloke insisted on sharpening his tools every time he was about to use them, whether they required sharpening or not. So ingrained was the habit that he gradually got a little careless and, in a moment of distraction he badly cut his hand on a freshly honed blade he hadn’t even realised he was still holding.

I’m sure the great majority of us have special places on our desks or work surfaces where we always put certain tools or equipment, not so much because they are handier as the fact that we’ve always put it there, and we wouldn’t know where to find it, if we put it somewhere else.

How many of us always take the same route when going to somewhere familiar, like home? The route may not be the most direct and might even take a little longer than some other available ones, but we always take this particular one, for no more important reason than the fact that it’s prettier, or it has always reminded you of other pleasant journeys from the past, or it always seems to be quieter, with less traffic. I don’t doubt, in a lot of cases, if any of a myriad chosen reasons were examined, we would find that the reason is actually invalid — it merely seems prettier because it’s also the one with less traffic; it’s not so much the fact that it reminds us of a pleasant past journey, as much as the fact that it’s the road where you first met your wife/husband when you did the good Samaritan bit and helped change a wheel for them, and romance blossomed!

We are all creatures of habit, in one way or another, aren’t we, it’s the fabric that holds us together, the thread that joins one part of life to another, the feeling that things are as they should be, or as we want them to be. That is why the missing post lady being late this morning became such a problem, if not a worry. Why hadn’t she shown up — was she sick, or had she been injured somewhere earlier in her round? Was there a mail strike I hadn’t heard about? Who can… Just a minute, is that her bike I can hear at the front gate, its little engine ticking away like a clock?

Sorry folks, I’ll have to stop now — must go and check what important stuff has arrived in my box this morning. (It’s always important — well until I open it and see the bill, it is!)

What are some of your particular habits? Do you find it difficult to embrace change?

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